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For many students and faculty, it’s an exhausting time to be on campus. The - climate has been supercharged by everything from the flurry of executive orders to lingering tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to  on higher ed. All while administrators come under intense pressure from groups on all sides to issue public statements, invest or divest, and cancel speakers — as  and state government actors stoke the flames.

Some have argued universities have a duty to  and, for example, . But this kind of political grandstanding undermines the central purpose of the university: the pursuit of truth, a process that requires debate and discussion. This process can’t happen when a university’s leaders put a proverbial thumb on the scale. Instead, it’s in the most fraught times that university leaders most need to draw a line in the sand against censorship and intimidation.

While the current climate feels unprecedented, . In the late 1960s, America was on fire — literally and figuratively. Protests erupted, generational divides widened, and a divisive president presided over a deeply unpopular war in Vietnam that claimed tens of thousands of lives. Amidst the chaos, the president of the University of Chicago convened a faculty committee to determine how the institution should respond to burning political and social upheaval.

Their answer was simple yet compelling: the university, as an institution, must remain neutral.

Enshrined in the committee’s Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action (commonly called the Kalven Report, after its lead author, First Amendment scholar Harry Kalven, Jr.), the report warned that universities “cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

In other words, the mere act of taking an official position on an issue stifles dissent — and, again, undermines the primary reason for the university’s existence.

Critics have argued that neutrality is impossible because everything is political, from  to . By that logic, even declining to make political statements is a political act. But this merely serves as a rhetorical trap designed to justify disposing of neutrality altogether.

America already has plenty of division and distrust. Institutional neutrality is a critical tool for fostering academia’s only peaceful path through the storm: honest debate.

The Kalven Report’s authors made clear that the university must take a position when its mission is at stake. For example, they must defend academic freedom when governments attempt to silence professors. But that’s entirely different from taking a stand on which side was “right” in Vietnam, or is “right” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There may be close cases in which people will disagree on where that line should be drawn. But denying that intelligent distinctions can be made is like arguing that one cannot differentiate red from blue because they are both on a visual spectrum that lacks clear demarcations. 

Neutrality does not mean that universities will play no part in grappling with social and political questions. The Kalven Report affirms that “[t]he university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” and notes that universities play a vital role “in fostering the development of social and political values in a society.” This is a long-term role “defined by the distinctive mission of the university and defined too by the distinctive characteristics of the university as a community.” But rather than acting as an advocacy organization, the university is a community of learned advocates with the freedom to agree or disagree with one another. Administrators must intentionally avoid becoming the former so they can function as the latter.

The Kalven Report recognized taking sides in the day’s debates would kneecap the university’s ability to serve as a forum for the pursuit of truth among individual scholars. “There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position,” the committee explained, “without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

Most faculty understand this. Two-thirds of faculty members agree that colleges and universities should remain neutral on political and social issues, according to ��ݮ��ƵAPP����’s 2024 Faculty Survey Report. The issue of neutrality is especially salient for adjunct instructors, who lack the tenure protections of their full-time peers. As ��ݮ��ƵAPP���� notes in its Scholars Under Fire report of attempts to sanction professors for speaking their minds, adjuncts — who  70 percent of all faculty — are particularly prone to speech-related terminations. An astounding 54 percent of attempts to sanction adjuncts result in termination, compared to 21 percent for all scholars. The most vulnerable faculty have the most to lose when universities take sides.

FIRE has taken a proactive stance on institutional neutrality, discouraging universities from taking up ill-advised “collective positions” on divisive issues. The , , Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth — and, of course, the University of Chicago — have all adopted official positions on institutional neutrality, and we’re leading the fight to get more colleges on board.

Institutional neutrality is key, but it is not the be-all and end-all. It’s an important slice of a well-diversified portfolio of pro-free speech policies — but just one slice. Universities must also refrain from punishing students and faculty for dissenting views amid sky-high tensions and changing political winds. Sometimes this is an uphill battle against political and social pressure. It’s vital nevertheless.

America already has plenty of division and distrust. Institutional neutrality is a critical tool for fostering academia’s only peaceful path through the storm: honest debate. All sides must have a fair chance to speak and be heard. If universities cannot deliver an environment that cultivates such discussion, they risk becoming just another partisan casualty in the culture war.